Stories for January 2015

Moody's Investors Service has downgraded the credit rating of Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras because of the widening kickback-corruption scandal affecting the country's largest corporation.The credit rating agency announced its decision late Thursday in a statement posted on its website.

US economic growth slowed sharply in the fourth quarter as weak business spending and a wider trade deficit offset the fastest pace of consumer spending since 2006. GDP expanded at a 2.6% annual pace after the third quarter's spectacular 5%, the Commerce Department said in its first fourth-quarter GDP snapshot.

Britain marked 50 years on Friday since the state funeral of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, with the boat which carried his coffin under the dipping dockside cranes in 1965 retracing its journey along London's River Thames.

The Celac summit held in Costa Rica and which brings together all Latin American and Caribbean countries released a declaration expressing full support for Argentina's 'legitimate' rights over the Falklands/Malvinas, recalls that 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of Resolution 2065 (first UN Assembly General resolution on the Falklands dispute) and again call on the goods offices of Ban Ki-moon to help start negotiations on the Argentina/UK dispute.

The annual dinner of the Chaine des Rotisseurs was held in the Embassy of Argentina in the United Kingdom and for the first time, the association dedicated its major event to Argentine food and wine. Over one hundred special guests enjoyed a menu of dishes and wines representing the best of the country’s regional culinary traditions.

A former bodyguard of Venezuela’s Socialist Party heavyweight Diosdado Cabello Leamsy Salazar, who fled the country earlier this week and was reportedly collaborating with US authorities investigating allegations of Venezuelan officials' involvement in drugs, said late president Hugo Chavez did not die on 5 March 2013 but on 30 December 2012.

A U.S. judge sentenced an Argentine-born scientist, now a nationalized American, to five years in prison for providing secret nuclear information to an FBI agent posing as a Venezuelan government official, the Justice Department announced.

A Brazilian state court froze the assets of former Petrobras Chief Executive Officer Jose Sergio Gabrielli amid an investigation of graft and money-laundering in the government-run oil producer's contracts with construction companies.

Argentine cabinet members diligently applied on Thursday President Cristina Fernandez strategy to disqualify facts and events surrounding the death of special prosecutor Alberto Nisman which has turned out to be a formidable blow to her administration's credibility.